Cedar Key, part 3

by Le Tigre Callipeaux – 3 January 2012

Tuesday, 4:30 p.m. – St. George Island, Florida

I am sitting on the deck of a beach house watching a pair of dolphins swim around about 30 feet off shore, in the Gulf of Mexico. Life is good. They must be into some fish or something (we’ll have to come up with names for these dolphins - - how cool?). It’s unusually cold today for Florida (about 50º - - but it feels like 65º in the sun). And there isn’t a cloud in the blue, blue sky. The water is rolling in with smallish waves (I think that the tide is come in). The ocean is blue too. In fact, everything but the sand and the dunes are blue and beautiful. 

We are here to do absolutely nothing for one entire week. Nothing. In preparation for our doing nothing, Eddie and I have been to the grocery store in Apalachicola for a Big Shop: we stocked up on enough stuff to last the week (pasta, salad stuff, taco fixins, fruit & veg, chips, dips, salsa, spices, and of course, libations). We then got lunch at a local seafood shack. Nothing fancy, just an amazing blackened grouper sandwich! Then, we thought that it would be a good idea to purchase a few pounds of locally caught (this morning) scallops and prawns at a shop that had all the fishing boats parked at docks right out its back door!

After that, we stopped by an antique shop to look around at all the nautical stuff they had on sale. Eddie could have bought the entire contents of this shop and locked himself away for the rest of his life. They had every kind of kitschy pirate and ship/nautical thing you could imagine. They had scull and cross bone signs that read, “Dead Men Tell No Tales”, giant sharks hanging from the ceiling, nets, ship steering wheels, treasure chests, buoys, flags, puffer fish, entire boats, and rigging from masts - - it was 1000+ square feet of stuff that had Eddie’s name written all over it. But after about 20 minutes of milling around through the densely packed merchandise, I saw that Eddie was developing a thousand-yard-stare so I had to pull him out of there before the place took him completely away. He bought a $6 bottle opener (I fear, however, that we will be back to this shop, and our next visit will put us down more than 6 bucks).

So after doing all that in preparation for doing nothing, here we are. We’re back at the beach house and the dolphins are still swimming around in front of me - - only now there are 4 dolphins! - - hmm…. I need more names for more dolphins! I’ve been sitting here typing only after washing down the chairs and table, moving stuff around, throwing in a load of laundry, setting up the music on the deck, and putting away all the groceries. Eddie has helped with all of this, of course, and now he’s talking about a scraping and painting the side of the house. Doing nothing is hard work.    

The reason I have begun this story by going into such detail describing my current status is so that you, my dear reader, do not fear at any point as you read further, that Edmund and I may have met our fateful end. The fact that I am sitting at this computer, typing these words right now is proof that I am still alive (and so is Eddie). So as you proceed to read about the first leg of our vacation in Cedar Key, Florida, please be assured that we were not horribly stabbed to death in our sleep, or thrown down a flight of stairs only to break our necks. Nor were we sawn up with a chainsaw; dismembered and made into soup. And we weren’t sealed into a wall with bricks and mortar in a spooky basement full of cobwebs. Ghosts didn’t scare us to death as they howled in the night and flew candelabras around our darkened hotel room. There were no poltergeist possessions of dolls, or headless spirits that chased us around with knives, or ghost trains that steamed through our guest room when the clock struck 12 each midnight! None of that happened.

The spirit of a young boy who drowned tragically sometime in the mid-1800s after crawling into the hotel’s water cistern wasn’t under our bed eagerly waiting for Eddie to accidentally hang his hand or foot over the edge of the mattress. And the innkeeper who has more than likely taken care of the boy since he also died over a hundred years ago wasn’t under the bed either. When Eddie got up during the night, there was no way that the ghost innkeeper and little boy would have lurched forward to grab his ankles! I told him that myself, and I was right…. It didn’t happen! He worried himself needlessly fearing that they would pull him under the bed and into another dimension where they would haunt him for all of eternity. I told him that he should put out of his mind any thoughts regarding any possibility of being so terrified that he would not be able to scream, and therefore go unheard and unnoticed as he was dragged across the old wooden floor by these two nonexistent yet incredibly malicious ghouls. There was no way that I would awake in the morning to discover that the only remaining evidence of his futile resistance were the many fingernail gouges that he made in the floor. Because nothing of that nature could have ever happened, so the argument was mute - - or rather, moot; no ghosts watched, unblinkingly with glowing yellow eyes for their chance to grab him and pull him under the bed, because there were no ghosts under there in the first place. There was never any chance that either of them would even be able scratch at his foot with a bloody, mud-encrusted fingernail, let alone get an entire mangled hand around his ankle!

On the list of other things that didn’t happen is that the Civil War soldier, who has reportedly stood guard since his death while he was a prisoner of the Northern army during the time when they used the hotel as a military base, didn’t try to stab us with his ghostly bayonet or make us answer 3 questions to gain access to the hotel’s bar (aptly named the Neptune Tavern). 

That soldier, with his skin pealing from his mutilated bones, didn’t mysteriously appear in the mirror of our guestroom either! In fact, none of the myriad of other spirits who, for one reason or another, are trapped between worlds was visible in any of the mirrors throughout the hotel at any time during our stay. Eddie worried himself to no end thinking that he would glimpse one or more of these specters hovering directly behind him ready to chain him up and pull him into a vortex that would magically open like a whirlpool, in a nearby wall. The fact that he is currently trying to figure out names for the increasing number of dolphins swimming in the ocean before us is proof that that didn’t happen.

We flew into Orlando last Friday afternoon and drove toward the Gulf, and to the Island Hotel, which is located in the little coastal town of Cedar Key, Florida. We had visited the hotel, and Cedar Key, more than 10 years ago (I think it might have been 1997). During that trip, we had a great time, but there was a life-size little girl doll standing in the parlor outside our guestroom that has lived in our memories these many years - - and we were hoping to not have an encounter with her again! She really gave us a scare! I wrote about her in one of my past stories and I can still picture the doll in my mind’s eye as being one of the spookiest things I have ever seen. In fact, I’ve been asking myself why we would even want to go back to the Island Hotel after being so scared and not being able to sleep during our previous visit. Why would we put ourselves through that again? Luckily, however, upon our return this past weekend, the doll was nowhere to be found! She was gone; the hotel had changed hands and the new owners didn’t know anything about her.

Of course Eddie had to confirm this with as many people working at the hotel as he possibly could: the owners, the bartender at the Neptune Tavern, various waitresses in the hotel’s dining room - - he got confirmation from all of these people that they had no idea about the doll. This interrogation was necessary because we had to make certain that the little girl was not just currently absent from the hotel, but that she was really gone. And by gone, I mean wiped from the collective memory of the hotel staff as well as all of the Friday evening patrons at the Neptune Tavern. And once we had established that no one knew anything about her, we agreed to drop the subject of her whereabouts entirely. We didn’t want to risk her hearing, or sensing through the ether, that we were booked through the weekend and that she should pack her bags with her rusty cleavers and other miscellaneous antique surgical supplies, and teleport herself back to her old digs for a weekend of fun in the sun and bloodbathing under the light of the cold Florida moon!

A Polaroid souvenir from our first visit to the Island Hotel!

Wednesday, 1:20 p.m. – St. George Island, Florida

The 4 dolphins are still swimming around in front of our beach house. (Wait, there are 5 now!) They’re just swimming slowly back and forth, up and down the beach about 50 yards off shore. The sun is still out and the only other things in the sky are a half-dozen pelicans that are diving down into the water after the same fish that are the source of our dolphins’ extended luncheon (I’m guessing). It’s supposed to be cold again today, but it’s warm in the sun, and quite comfortable, actually. And even though the beach is lined with big, fancy beach houses on stilts, I’ve seen a total of 6 people walking along the white sand in front of our house: 4 earlier this morning, and 2 just now (with a dog). This is just too nice.

Earlier, while considering the ideal conditions of our beach house (or as I have christened, the Sea Shack) on St. George Island, Eddie speculated that perhaps the ghosts of the Island Hotel had indeed pulled us into a whirlpool vortex last weekend and we are now in some sort of parallel universe? The Island Hotel website listed the front of the building and one of the guestrooms as “a gateway to other dimensions.” I reminded him that he had just gotten off the phone from talking to his sister in Minnesota, and that unless AT&T has an interuniverse calling plan that I am not aware of having signed up for, we are most assuredly still in same reality as she, and therefore not in some ghost vortex where the weather is always nice and the ocean is always full of dolphins.

Seeing my point about the cell phone reception, Eddie mused that if this were indeed a ghost universe, the conditions would more than likely not be so idyllic. “The ocean would be made of blood, the dolphins would be horrible monsters, the pelicans would be pterodactyls or those Ring Wraiths from that Lord of the Rings movie, the beach would be quicksand, the beach house would be full of rats and murderers and other scary things, and you’d always hear the sound of chains rattling, and all the door hinges would be squeaky, and the television would eat us alive….” Eddie’s mouth tried to keep pace with his mind as he constructed this ghost world by listing all these crazy things. Eventually, he would have worked himself up into a state of being afraid of his own shadow. (I’ve seen him do this before!) But before he got to that point, he realized that he needed more coffee, and he went into the house to warm up his cup.

Emerging from the house with a fresh cup, he strayed from the topic of his imminent capture and transportation to a blood-soaked alternative universe, and turned his questioning toward a different course of logic that asked that if there are indeed these parallel dimensions and universes (some more spooky than others), what are their names? And for that matter, what is the name of the universe that we currently occupy? I told him that he should occupy his mind with trying to come up with names for all the dolphins swimming around in the non-blood-filled ocean of this dimension. In fact, forget altogether about these nonexistent ghost dimensions to which the front door of the Island Hotel is not the paranormal gateway. Ignoring my advice (or perhaps not even hearing me), Eddie said after a long pause, “I think that I’ll call this dimension: Edventureland!”

This past Saturday, which was New Year’s Eve, Eddie and I began our day wandering around the island of Cedar Key. The small town is loaded with little shops selling gorgeous things, such as canvas bags and purses, and books, and other various accoutrements. It’s a lovely, quaint town with people driving golf carts down the streets and out to a large pier that is built up with more shops and restaurants. We discovered at one of these eateries, that clams are one of the local catches. And so for lunch on New Year’s Eve we ate steamed clams and sat watching the ocean (also with dolphins swimming around) from an outdoor deck overlooking the ocean. It was on this deck that Eddie and I hatched our plans for the New Year and the purchase of our next vehicle.

Our Ford F-150 pickup truck, which we call The General, has been getting on in its years (and miles - - 230,000 actually). It’s a useful truck because Eddie hauls around a lot of bulky stuff for his work as an artist, but we fear that it might soon become too expensive to maintain as things continue to break and need repair. So we’ve decided that when The General finally dies we will buy a white cargo van! This van will be even more useful to Eddie than the pickup truck because he’ll be able to stand up inside it rather than crawl around on his knees to get at his tools. And we’ve decided that we’ll name this white van, Shadowfax, after Gandalf’s white horse in the Lord of the Rings! Those of you not familiar this horse will soon have its likeness burned into your retinas, because we are going to hire an artist to airbrush a painting of the mighty steed on each side of the van! 

Instead of an Econoline van, it’ll be an Equestriline van! Picture it now: a life-sized white stallion, running at a full speed gallop, long white mane and tail blowing in the wind (probably mountains and a sunset in the background), and the words, “Shadowfax: Lord of the Vans”, painted in silver and gold metallic beneath the beast’s magnificent hooves! Then we’re going to get vanity license plates that read: THE 1 VAN. And across the front of the vehicle, written in backwards letters, so that people can read it in their rearview mirrors, we’ll write: One van to rule them all! (Those of you not familiar with the Lord of the Rings storyline: it’s basically a movie about an evil ring that controls everything and how all these other weird people destroy it.) Finally, the horn will mimic Boromir’s Horn of Gondor, and when sounded, it will call all good people to our aid to help make the idiot in front of us take that left turn, for @#$%sakes!!

That’s our plan, or shall I say, New Year’s Resolution: a) to buy this van, b) transform it into the supervan that I described above, and c) drive around Minneapolis and St. Paul and see how long it takes for us to appear on a Strange Twin Cities List in Metro magazine or something. Eddie said that he couldn’t imagine a better year that begins with us eating clams and drinking beer on a deck perched out over the ocean, watching dolphins swim into the sunset, and ending it driving around Edventureland behind the wheel of Shadowfax: The Lord of the Vans!

Artist's rendering of THE 1 VAN  © 2012

Thursday, 11:30 a.m. – St. George Island, Florida

            There was a rat in the sea shack last night!

            We spotted something running along the kitchen baseboards the day of our arrival. But we thought it was just a mouse that had come inside because of the unusually cool weather outside. The management company sent over a pest control guy who set a trap on Tuesday. But Tuesday night the trap went off and we heard a loud squeak! And when we checked the trap the following morning, there was nothing in the trap! So we filled it with more peanut butter, reset it, and placed it back under the stove. But then the pest control guy came over once more and set out a few of those sticky pads that the mice get their feet stuck on. He asked us about the trap under the stove and Eddie told him that not all of the original peanut butter was eaten and the guy speculated that it might be a rat that we are after. And he looked a little worried, as if it didn’t look like we were up to dealing with a rat. I agreed with that sentiment, but deal we did, like it or not.

            At about 10:00 p.m. we heard squeaking again and, looking into the kitchen, we saw that a rodent had gotten itself stuck to one of the pads near the refrigerator! And it was definitely at rat! I should back up here and say that “we” didn’t really see it, actually, I was too afraid to look! So by “we”, I mean “Eddie” saw the little monster, I hid in the dining room and offered moral support: “From staying at a haunted hotel to dealing with Hantavirus! I don’t know which is worse?” It’s as if we know instinctually that these critters are bad. “He’s stuck to the pad, but I think it’ll take him a long time to die,” Eddie reflected somberly, and with a furrowed brow....

“So I shall smote him with this wooden spoon!”

He then withdrew an old wooden cooking spoon from a large vase filled with a variety of cooking utensils. Doing this he made an “Shhhink” sound to imitate a sword being drawn from its scabbard. He eyed the spoon, looked over to me, and disappeared into the kitchen. I then heard him say, “You shall not pass,” which was followed by a few squeaks, and then there was silence. Eddie walked back into my view a moment later with triumphant, yet stunned look on his face (I don’t think he blinked for a full 5 minutes). “I hope he doesn’t have any friends,” Eddie said, still without blinking and barely moving his lips. Followed by, “We should go check the ocean and make sure that it hasn’t turned to blood and that the sky isn’t full of pterodactyls!”

Friday, 10:15 a.m. – St. George Island, Florida

            There have been no additional rat sightings and the ocean didn’t turn to blood (as far as I know). We haven’t heard any squeaking or the sound of anything running around in the sea shack. Yesterday, we went for a long walk along the beach and the ocean was as beautiful as I have ever seen it! We spent the afternoon walking about 3 miles down to the end of the island where there is a narrow waterway that separated us from the neighboring isle. There were a few people on the beach, walking up and down the seashore as we were. But not many considering the number of beach houses we passed. Most of the houses appeared to be vacant…. This place must get crazy busy during the high season (whenever that is?).

            

            Last weekend in Cedar Key, we were told by a number of people that it was their busy time of year, the weeks after Christmas and the New Year. There were a good number of people milling about in the shops and restaurants of the town. It was steady at the Island Hotel with people checking in and out on a daily basis. The Neptune Tavern was at times busy, but never so packed that we couldn’t find a place to sit and chat with the locals.

We asked about the murals and paintings on the walls throughout the hotel on Saturday night while we waited for our New Year’s Eve dinner reservations for the main dining room of the hotel. Several people sitting nearby chimed in about how they were painted in the 1940s by a woman who was a divorcee from New York. Evidently, she had swindled her daughter out of a thousand dollars to finance moving to Cedar Key where she painted murals at the Island Hotel in trade for room and board.

The paintings are quite nice, actually. In the upstairs parlor, or common area that has doors leading to the individual guest rooms, there are sepia-toned murals forming a 4-foot wide band around the room at eye level. They depict scenes around Cedar Key, showing the landscape with trees and the port with boats. They are very elegantly painted with a monochrome palette of reddish-brown showing visible brush and sponge marks. The paintings are soft and gestural as they cover the rough-sawn wooden planks that run horizontally around the mid-sized room. The planks have aged by warping and splitting slightly, and there is evidence of stains from sap and moisture affecting the surface, giving the artwork an aged patina.

 

            Downstairs in the hotel’s reception area, there are 2 large paintings by the same artist, one above the fireplace, and the other on an adjacent wall. They exhibit a wider palette of yellow, blue, and red hues, but they too are lightly painted and depict views of the houses and streets of the area. Lastly, lording over the bar at the Neptune Tavern there hangs a large painting (a masterpiece, really) whose subject is King Neptune himself! He is seated on a throne beneath the sea and he has mermaids as well as a bunch of other sea creatures at his side.

He magnanimously gazes out across his watery realm with a stern, fatherly visage and long white beard. In one arm, he holds one of the mermaids, and in the other, he grasps his famous trident spear. A second mermaid conveniently decants wine into a silver chalice at the right side of the composition. Consistent with the style of the other paintings found throughout the hotel, the scene is rendered in soft pastel colors with no sharply contrasting tones comprising this underwater utopia.

            “How do you think it’s possible that that mermaid can pour wine into the goblet while they’re all underwater?” Eddie asked as we sipped at our drinks.

            “I’m not sure, but it looks like they’re having a good time,” I replied.

            “Do you see the bullet holes in the painting?” asked the bartender.

            “Bullet holes?” we both asked.

            The bartender proceeded to point out the 3 dark holes in the wooden panel’s surface. Each was about the size of a dime, with a charred ring circling its parameter. They were barely noticeable. She told us that not long after the painting was completed and installed at its current location above the bar, a jealous husband fired 3 warning shots over the head of a man he had found talking with his wife. The shots struck the painting, one just missing Neptune’s torso, a second that pierced his lordship’s clavicle, and the third hitting 6 inches above the head of the mermaid with the wine.

            “I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Eddie. “That’s crazy. They almost look as if they were shot into the painting on purpose. Their placement is perfect.”

            “The daughter of the artist, the one whom the mother swindled the money from, was at the hotel 2 years ago. She’s in her 80s now and she spent some time applying her artistry touching up, and restoring the paintings during her stay. She had worked with her mom on the paintings back in the 1940s. So she was able to help out old Neptune with a touch of paint here and there,” the bartender explained.

            “I’m not sure if it looks like Neptune needed any help. He’s probably been bragging to those mermaids about having been shot and having a cool scar for the past 60 years,” responded Eddie.

            “In fact, the more I look at that old fellow, the more he looks familiar to me. What is it? Where have I seen him before?” Eddie asked.

            “He does look familiar, doesn’t he?” I added. The bartender shrugged a bit and went to ring up the bill for another customer.

            “You know what it is? It’s a copy of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses in Rome, in the Vatican. That’s what it is! It’s an exact copy! The artist and her daughter knew their art history, or they had traveled to Rome. Whichever it is (or maybe both) that is the definitely Moses! Only instead of holding the Ten Commandments, he’s got a topless mermaid in his arm!” exclaimed Eddie as he solved the riddle of the Neptune Tavern.

Saturday, 12:45 p.m. – St. George Island, Florida

            There was another rat in the sea shack!

           

            Last night at about 10 o’clock we heard the trap under the stove go snap! At first, Eddie tried to say that it was probably just the noise of metal clanging from a vent, but it wasn’t. We looked under the stove and the brother or sister of the first rat was lying lifelessly on the shadowy floor. Eddie quickly stood up and said, “Oh no…. If there’s more than one, then there are probably hundreds! One on a cold night might just be a random fluke, but 2 rats with two days between them means that they’ve set up shop in this place!”

            I couldn’t agree with him more! The sea shack was overrun!

            Since it was well past normal business hours, we called the after hour phone number for the management company. Dialing the phone, Eddie said, “If I am one thing, I am a man of action. And I can tell you right now that we are leaving this place first thing tomorrow morning!” I agreed that it was likely that nothing could be done that night (and that we would have to spend another night in the rat shack!).  Eddie chatted on the phone with the caretaker, who is only on call for extreme emergencies, like fires, so we were out of luck if we thought that someone would come running to our aid.

I was hoping that it would be one of those grand rescues where a team of Navy Seals burst in through the windows, silently usher us using only hand signals to rope ladders that are dangling from the choppers above, and then, we all lift off and fly away as they nuke the Rat Shack leaving a massive crater in the earth. Eddie said that it would also be nice if they then flew us to a secrete volcano island hideout out in the Gulf and served us martinis, but that was not going to happen and we were doomed to spend the night alone!

We stayed up a while longer trying to distract ourselves with what was on the television, but after watching as much of Batman Returns Forever as any two mortals can, we decided to throw the dice and cast our fate into the wind. We had to sleep so we could get up as early as possible and get the hell out of that place! So we walked very slowly through the house turning off each and every light and pausing in each room. As each switch clicked between our fingers, more shadows emerged, and the places not lit by the moon dissolved into voids. 

Finally, ending up in the kitchen area, we stopped as we scanned around the room and looked further out into the dining and living areas. With the flick of the last switch, the entire place went dark, but the ghostly after-image of the furniture and architecture glowed briefly in my mind, and at once it began to move with the roiling scurry of thousands of rats covering every surface! Eddie quickly turn the light back on and the room returned to its normal state with solid countertops, floor, ceiling, etc. There were no rats (none visible at least). So we went to bed.

Sleep was rough and I think we both had nightmares. I got up during the middle of the night and turned on all the lights in the house before using the bathroom. Eddie’s snoring was about as bad as it usually is, but I didn’t mind when I thought that perhaps the rats might be afraid of the snoring monster in the bedroom. Perhaps that kept them from crawling all over us during the night?

We made it unscathed through the night and the next morning an old-timer handyman came by the house to tend to the rat and reset the trap. He thought it was just a mouse, but Eddie and I still think it was a rat. Its tail was too long and thick, and his legs were too long, and he was too crazy-looking to be a mouse. Discussing these finer points, the handyman said that he once had one of them run up his pant-leg.

“Yikes!” replied Eddie, “What do you do when that happens? Stand as perfectly still as possible, trying not the spook the critter more, or run around like you’re on fire?”

“You get out of those pants as fast as you can. That’s what you do!” answered the handyman as he grinned. As we stood there, discussing rats and pants, I looked the elderly gentleman up and down and thought that he looked about as tough and stoic as I could imagine, so any thought of us being too wimpy to deal with wee-little mice (or rats) dissolved when he finally said, “I wouldn’t stay in here either.”

With that, the handyman left, and we continued to pack our bags. Eddie had called the management company earlier this morning and they were looking into the possibility of finding us new accommodation. It’s Saturday though, and we were slightly concerned that they wouldn’t be able to (or perhaps, unwilling to) find us anything comparable to what we had before the Sea Shack became the Rat Shack. So as we packed up all the food and supplies we had in the kitchen, we speculated as to what would constitute “Plan B”.

We discussed returning to Cedar Key and the Island Hotel. Eddie thought that maybe he should call down there to ask if they had any vacancies for the night. Thinking that that might be a little premature, however, Eddie began to worry that it might not be such a good idea to go back there, “Maybe we only just made it out of there alive and if we went back, the ghosts would take it as a personal challenge to get us back, and get us back good!”

Eddie continued to say, “And you’ve been writing all this stuff in your blog-story about how nothing bad happened at the hotel because there were no ghosts in the first place! What if they’ve been able to read what you’ve been writing, and now they’re extra mad? They might be out for revenge, which is what ghosts do best!”

I didn’t acknowledge his point, but secretly I agreed that it might be too soon to return to the Island Hotel. What I’ve writing here could possibly be perceived as bragging and they may take it as a ghostly challenge to make everything I’ve cited in this story as not have happened, happen. Revenge indeed!

“If we end up going back to the Island Hotel, I’m going to call Nell and schedule a hair coloring for when we get back to Minneapolis,” Eddie said. (Nell is our friend who cuts Eddie’s hair back home.) “Because those ghosts will not be happy with us one bit! I might even expect that they will be furious with rage! They will terrorize us and scare us so bad that I bet my hair will turn completely white! 

"They’ll pull out all the stops! Once they see us coming back down the road it’ll be like that Clint Eastwood movie, they’ll set up a Ghost Gauntlet and that’ll be the end of us!! They’ll shoot the Island Hotel so full of ghost holes that the entire place will probably dissolve into another dimension with us in it! We’ll be stuck there for the rest of eternity!”

At that very moment, the telephone rang and Eddie nearly jumped out of his shoes. “Yikes! It’s happening already! The ghosts can hear us through the phones!” That may be true, but when he answered the phone, it wasn’t the howling screams of a million hungry spirits on the line; it was the voice of the nice lady with the management company who was calling to tell us that our problems were over. They had found us another place to stay.

Sayonara, turquoise-roofed Rat Shack!

We packed up the gear and got the heck out of the Rat Shack! Driving to the main office, we were giving the choice of 2 seaside houses nearby. So we hopped back into the car and went to check them out. And so, my dear reader, rest assured that things worked out (for the time being) and I am now sitting, typing these words into my computer as the waves of the Gulf of Mexico roll gently toward shore. Eddie is running around inside the new beach house (which we haven’t christened with a name as of yet). He likes this place much more than the other one because it looks like a Red Lobster restaurant on the inside, and it’s not as fancy as the Rat Shack (that sounds like an oxymoron on multiple counts!).

We haven’t seen any dolphins, however. I imagine that they’re out there though. Which reminds me, we never came up with names for all those cute dolphins.

Hmm….

Well, one will have to be Shadowfax…for the van. Another will be Gandalf for 2 counts: 1) being the rider of the horse, Shadowfax, and 2) for him waging battle with the Balrog, which mirrored Eddie’s dispatching of the first rat. A third dolphin will be Moses for being the inspiration for the Island Hotel artist. The fourth would definitely then be Neptune. Finally, I will call the fifth dolphin, Poseidon. Even though Neptune and Poseidon are the same person, Eddie mentioned last night that he thought he remembered reading (perhaps years ago when he read the Agony and the Ecstasy, by T. H. White), that Michelangelo fashioned his likeness of Moses after an ancient Greek statue of Poseidon. (We’ll have to look that up.)

So it comes full circle from sculptures of Poseidon to the paintings of the Neptune Tavern, from parallel ghost universes to driving around Edventureland in a van with a big horse painted along its sides, and from the Rat Shack to the sea hut that’s not as fancy, but looks like a Red Lobster, and may or may not be infested with rats, mice, cockroaches, bedbugs, spiders, or the zombie hoards that are floating with the tide just out to sea who will soon make landfall and proceed to chase us around the unnamed house.

I’ll let you know how that all turns out.  – LC

Looking down the street in Cedar Key, Florida.

Looking out to sea from the waterside shops.

A restaurant on the pier.

Fishing docks in Cedar Key.

Sunset in Cedar Key

Apalachicola Bay Oysters!

Eddy Teach's, the raw bar in St. George Island, Florida

More oysters!

More and more oysters!

A kitty in Apalachicola!

Edmund Callipeaux, alive and well in Cedar Key.